Blog

On Blogging And Photography

I had to ask myself recently, do people still read blogs? I used to blog all the time, and to be honest, it feels like only a few years ago when blogging was all the rage. As it turns out, it was actually over twelve years ago when I first started publishing content online. Over twelve years! But somewhere between Web 2.0 and today, it seems to have fallen out of favor as compared to Facebook or other platforms. Everything has to be quicker today, for some reason. I remember when people thought Twitter, by limiting its users' tweets to 140 characters or less, was too constraining for meaningful conversation. Today, with the way we consume mobile media, 140 characters feels downright excessive!

The fact of the matter is, I love to write. And blogging was a great wave in the evolution of the internet because it gave people like me the freedom to write, and share, and socialize in creative new ways that simply weren't possible before the advent of one-click-publishing.

In the early years of my own blogging experience, I wrote mostly about training for marathons and triathlons. Some of my entries were poetic, but most took on the form of a daily journal entry, detailing all the bits and pieces of the day's workout, the intervals, the recovery periods, and the hope that the work would make me a stronger, faster, and leaner human machine. One could imagine this getting old, quickly, but I kept at it for several years because I loved the practice of writing so much.

Then something really cool happened: the camera phone.

Who would have ever thought we'd be carrying a camera with us all day, every day, because it was integrated with our minuscule mobile phone that was also attached to us so permanently? Almost immediately, I started taking pictures while out running and riding my bike of the scenic landscapes that surrounded me, morphing my writing habit into a picture-and-story-telling habit. Predictably, the camera phones got better over time (hello, iPhone!) and my writing became more truncated, until I was simply focusing on photography.

Now, here we are today. 2016. Facebook rules the web the way Amazon rules the modern shopping experience. Everyone is a photographer because everyone has an iPhone and an app or two with some cool retro filters. People generally seem too busy to read anything anymore, and why bother, when you can just "explore the world through someone else's eyes" via Periscope?

Don't get me wrong, I use and love social media of all kinds, but I still like to write in long-form and I love to take pictures with a real camera. I created this blog so that, from time to time, I have a place to write a few (dozen?) paragraphs to talk about art, photography, and to tell some of the stories behind the pictures I publish through Cherry Fivers Photography. Who knows where it will go?